Monday, March 25, 2013

How to get people to donate blood

If you want people to do something, is it better to tell
them what wonderful things will happen if they do as you ask, or what terrible things
will happen if they don’t? In other words, should you entice or threaten? That’s a question Eileen Chou from the University of
Virginia and Keith Murnighan of Northwestern University set out to answer, at
least with respect to blood donation.

There are chronic shortages in the supply of blood available
for transfusions. Hopefully, the need for donated blood will someday be
eliminated by the development of artificial blood. In the meantime, however,
the Red Cross is working on getting more people to donate blood. To that end,
they took a close look at the messaging used to encourage people to donate blood.

The authors sent 3500 undergraduates one of five different emails soliciting
blood donations. One email merely stated the time
and place at which the recipient could donate blood. The other four were framed
as either saving lives (gains to be made if the subject accedes to the
request) or preventing deaths (losses to be suffered if the person doesn’t
comply). In addition, each version was presented either as being urgent or
moderately important.

Here’s the urgent, loss prevention message:

Don’t delay. Help prevent
someone from dying! Each year, 4.5 million Americans would die without blood
transfusions. Every second, 2 people could die waiting for blood. Every pint
that you donate can help them avoid dying. Don’t delay! Help prevent unnecessary
deaths.

And the moderate need, gain
message:

Act now. Help save
someone’s life! Every day, many people could be saved by donated blood. Every
pint that you donate can help them stay healthy. Act now! Promote healthy
lives.

I haven’t included the other
two variations, but you get the idea. Which message would be more likely to
drive you to the donation site? It turns out that the ‘prevent a death’ message
was far more successful than the ‘save a life’ message. More than three times
as many people showed up to donate blood after receiving the ‘loss’ message
than did for the ‘gain’ message. Interestingly, the degree of need did not seem
to matter very much. Perhaps, people already have a sense of how essential it
is to donate blood.

This greater desire to prevent
loss versus to achieve gain has been documented in other arenas. The authors of
this study performed a second study in which they tested whether requests to
prevent a charity from no longer being able to provide services would elicit
more or fewer contributions than requests to increase that charity’s services.
Again, people were more charitable to prevent losses.

I guess the lesson from this
data is that if you want someone to do something, give them the doomsday
scenario and not the possible utopia their actions could create.

Stochastic Scientist? What's up with that?

Why the Stochastic Scientist? As I'm sure you all know, 'stochastic' is another word for 'random', which is what I intend for the focus of this blog. Although my formal training is as a molecular biologist, there are many other fields of science that are also fascinating and beautiful. It's my intention to blog about which ever scientific discovery or invention catches my, and hopefully your, fancy.

I also hope to inspire people to learn more about science. By choosing among a huge variety of scientific endeavors, I'll undoubtably hit upon something that will pique my readers' interest.

I guess I could have called my blog 'The Joy of Science', but that wouldn't have been quite so random.